Sheets & Giggles: 11,000 Pre-Launch Emails Decided the $1M First Year of a Bedding DTC Started After a Layoff

In 2017, the entire team at the wearables startup where Colin McIntosh worked was laid off. What he started next was bed sheets, under the name Sheets & Giggles, a pun on the English idiom “shits and giggles.”

According to the show notes from his appearance on the eCommerce MasterPlan podcast, the business he launched three weeks after that layoff reached $1M in revenue in its first 12 months. Through that period McIntosh worked alone, 16 to 18 hours a day, and paid himself nothing for 15 months. Roughly two years after the first shipment, in November 2020, the company recorded its first $1M month, as discussed on Retention Chronicles.

The interesting part is that this looks like a crowdfunding success story, but the outcome was effectively decided in the seven weeks before the Indiegogo campaign went live. Follow the numbers and it becomes clear what actually worked in a category as undifferentiated as bedding.

How it started

The product is lyocell fibre made from eucalyptus, described as using about 96% less water than cotton production, framed as saving, per sheet set, roughly five years of one person’s average drinking water.

What the 11,000 actually secured

The launch design that Shopify’s blog breaks down is the heart of this case. Before opening the Indiegogo campaign, McIntosh ran 12 landing page variants through Kickoff Labs and tested roughly 50 Facebook ad combinations. Ad testing ran at $1,000 a week. His line on that: if you can’t spend $1,000 on ads, you shouldn’t be launching a company.

Seven weeks produced 11,000 email addresses at a 46% capture rate, extraordinarily high. Seventy percent of traffic was mobile. His pre-set target was 300 customers in the first 72 hours out of a 10,000-name list, i.e. a 3% assumption. That arithmetic is why day one of the Indiegogo campaign drew a crowd and ended at a record $284,000.

Put differently, crowdfunding here was not a funding round but a mechanism for making an already-warmed list check out at once. The platform did not bring the customers; the customers were assembled over seven weeks and then walked over to the platform.

The part advertising doesn’t explain

The other thing you cannot leave out is Reddit. McIntosh posted his own résumé there, it passed a million views, and it became a major source of organic traffic. He later ran a side project called Sheets Resume, a résumé review service. He gathered an audience with something unrelated to bedding, not with bedding ads, and he repeatedly argues for making valuable content decoupled from product promotion.

The contrast with Necklow, the neck pillow brand that took off on a single winning social ad, is instructive. A single-ad launch is fast, but growth stops the moment ad costs rise. Sheets & Giggles split its entry points three ways: paid, community and its own list.

The decision to raise LTV

The figures disclosed on Retention Chronicles explain the later growth. Initial LTV was around $150, with CAC at $60–$70. AOV on sheets alone was about $100 ($70 sheets × 1.5 items per order). At those ratios, a small rise in ad costs breaks the economics.

So the line expanded, comforters, pillowcases, duvet covers, blankets, mattress protectors, pillows, a mattress, and then coffee, t-shirts and sleep masks. LTV rose to $300–$400. With CAC unchanged, more than doubling what you can recover completely changes how much you can afford to spend on acquisition. Hipstik, the hosiery DTC that protected ad economics by pushing its return rate down to 1%, attacked a different variable, but both are answers to the same problem: building a business that can absorb rising ad costs.

What did not work, and the constraints

The original product concept was bamboo sheets, dropped because it was judged too weak to move people on a crowdfunding platform. There is also the experience of agencies that charged a lot and delivered little.

The team structure is easy to misread. Six people are full-time, but counting contractors, 3PLs in California and South Carolina, and manufacturing in India, 30 to 40 people are involved. “Six people at this revenue” does not mean six people run it. McIntosh himself tracks revenue per head and says it exceeds mattress company Casper’s roughly $400,000.

And the biggest constraint is those 15 unpaid months. Whether a newly laid-off individual can survive that stretch depends entirely on savings and living costs. This is a precondition, not a tactic.

A million Reddit views cannot be engineered

The million-view Reddit post that set off the launch cannot be engineered, and the same post today would not produce the same result. Even the 11,000-name list depends on a combination of product, pitch and timing that produced a 46% capture rate. The sequence can be designed. The size of the hit cannot.

What Sheets & Giggles demonstrates is not the pun in the name or the eucalyptus fibre but a point about sequence: line up the buyers before you have something to sell. Even the three-week turnaround after the layoff was a way of protecting that sequence. Happy Puppin, which gathered 60,000 followers on dog memes before turning it into a store, followed the same order: audience first, product second.